People have enjoyed playing games for thousands of years. The Egyptians had board games and the ancient Greeks held the Olympics. Interpersonal games provide entertainment, relaxation, and an opportunity for competition. Games also encourage people to come together and socialize. The advent of the personal computer and public data networks, such as the Internet, has led to the development of online games. Players from across the world connect and play games with, and against, one another. Online games are played solo, one on one, team versus team, and in many other scenarios.
In particular, massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) involve hundreds to thousands of people playing simultaneously. The largest MMOGs have a player base, usually through subscriptions, of over ten million. MMOGs offer players a persistent gaming environment. Players create a character that serves as their in-game persona. Player achievements and character attributes persist even when a player is offline. The player can return to the game at any time and continue game play. Online virtual worlds are similar to MMOGs. Virtual worlds offer users the ability to interact with one another online via an avatar that they have created. Through their avatar, users can explore the virtual world and socialize with other users. Unlike MMOGs, the virtual worlds are not games, as there are no points, winners, or levels. Hybrid virtual worlds with attributes of online games are possible.
Although some challenges in MMOGs can be overcome by an individual player, many challenges require a team of players for successful outcome. Teamwork and online communication are vital. Currently, MMOG players, as well as users of virtual worlds, communicate online or “chat” primarily through text messaging, though audio and video messaging are increasingly available.
Currently, text messages received by, or typed by, a player are displayed in a chat box on a screen display. The chat box also displays text messages from other sources. Due to the large number of players, all of whom can interact at any time, a player can quickly become overloaded with text messages. The size of a chat box is fixed and only a limited number of lines of text can be displayed. To see more messages, a player must scroll up or down, meanwhile either ignoring incoming messages received and potentially missing useful information, or losing focus on their main conversation and activity.
Conventional techniques for differentiating text messages in a chat box mainly adjust message appearance or display. These techniques include color coding, filtering, adjusting font size, creating multiple chat boxes, and resizing and color coding chat boxes. Existing techniques of text message management fail to decrease the information load on players or increase the signal-to-noise ratio of messages of value to the player. The relative importance of each message to the player is ignored.
Therefore, an approach is needed to manage chat-based text messages in online gaming, virtual worlds, and similar online activity genre. Preferably, such an approach would reduce the amount of text that a player must process, while still allowing the player to notice and investigate information of likely importance.